Ricky Gervais meets Dick Cheney in The Receptionist (at Trinity Repertory Company through January 11). Does that make Adam Bock's unsettling workplace comedy Richard II? Hardly. The short, Pinter-influenced work, seen here in its New England premiere, zeroes in not on the eloquence of kings but on the sometimes veiled, irrepressible mundanity of office chatter — even when it turns out that what the office is up to is nefarious. The play is full of allusions, oblique and otherwise, to recent national paranoia and the Big Brotherish encroachments on our integrity and freedom for which it has provided a convenient inroad. But like a cheerful mask pulled over a monster, the inane, omniscient business of the title character goes on as, in Tony winner Eugene Lee's set design, she mans her bland communications center backed by a bulletin board full of tacked-up Christmas cards and a coffee machine crowned with a Frosty the Snowman fortunately too fake to take the damaging heat.

I have been a fan of the Canadian-born, Paula Vogel–trained Bock since Coyote Theatre premiered his Swimming in the Shallows, in which the love object is a steadily lap-executing shark, almost nine years ago. Since then, he's become a fixture Off Broadway, where The Receptionist premiered in 2007, following by a year its Obie-winning companion piece, The Thugs (recently produced by Boston's Apollinaire Theatre Company). Bock's brief, edgy pieces tend to be sketchy, if not slight, with roughly half of The Receptionist emerging like a sharply written episode of a workplace-set sit-com before the harried boss, Mr. Raymond, breezes in with a single line that quite changes the tone of things.

Following a cryptic prologue, we have innocuously whiled away the time listening to sexy, ditzy, slightly frantic co-worker Lorraine Taylor regale bosomy receptionist Beverly Wilkins with skittering tales of romantic crises. That's when the latter was not juggling the buttons that allow her to announce "Northeast Office" to multiple callers while at the same time carrying on a string of sage personal conversations of her own. True, there had been the unsolicited appearance of Mr. Dart from the Central Office, he hugging his dossier while throwing awkward small talk into the mix. But all had seemed regulation around-the-water-cooler intercourse. Now, like Otis Redding suddenly slammed up against Kafka or Václav Havel, we're sittin' by the banks of Guantánamo Bay.

Artistic director Curt Columbus is at the helm of the airy, drolly detailed Trinity Rep production, its reception desk manned by well-cast company stalwart Janice Duclos (for whom the role may have been written, Bock having served a stint as a TRC public-relations assistant). Her face a map of solicitous disapproval, her sweater a feast of poinsettias, Duclos seems to the switchboard born, carrying on her duties with smug, matronly responsibility. She makes her brisk character generous and helpful, if a bit of a busybody. And whether admonishing a friend embarked on a romantic misadventure or frosting her husband for spending the phone-bill stash on a collectible teacup, Duclos's Beverly is a master of the one-sided conversation, her expressions conveying everything you need to know of what's being extruded into the other end of the phone wire. She brings the same casual, businesslike attentiveness to abandoning what she perceives to be a sinking human ship.

Adam Bock is a good listener When Adam Bock first came to Providence in the late '80s, after a friend told him there was this great playwriting teacher at Brown, he was busting with unstoppable aspiration

Ballad of a Dead Man It all starts harmlessly enough. A woman in a nearly empty café, annoyed by a ringing phone ignored by its owner, picks it up and answers. She might as well have flipped open Pandora's Nokia.

Old horse, new saddle But what about this matter of throwing a saddle on an old warhorse again? Well, the rider this time around thinks that the play is still as frisky as a colt. She hasn't directed this before, but she has seen it five or six times.

Trivial pursuit It's difficult to put on an awful performance of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest .

Myth understanding Trinity Repertory Company has been developing and is staging Shapeshifter , by Laura Schellhardt, which will have its world premiere May 1-31.

Odd couples The East Hampton Board of Health would doubtless approve Grey Gardens: The Musical , since it comes minus the crapping cats, feral raccoons, and piles of garbage that form the supporting cast and unsanitary milieu of the famed documentary on which it's based.

Lady of the Sea If all you know of the Aran Islands is the plays of Martin McDonagh, you probably think their populace is an untamed and violent lot.

Hot ticket Here's a hot flash for you: dying is easy (in the theatrical sense of bombing onstage); producing a successful show is hard.

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